Berserker Attack

by Fred Saberhagen

  A speedy coach was overtaking them on the road. The vehicle was not ornate, but it was well built, looking as if it might belong to some nobleman or prelate of lower-middle rank. The friars’ ears gave them plenty of warning to step aside; four agile load-beasts were making the wheels clatter over the leveled stones at a good speed.

  As the coach rumbled past, Brother Jovann felt his eyes drawn to the face of an occupant who rode facing forward, with his head visible in profile and one elbow extended slightly from a window. So far as could be judged, this man was of stocky build. He was well dressed, old and gray-bearded, though the short-cut hair on his head was still of ginger color. His thick mouth was twisted slightly, as if ready to spit or to dispute.

  “They might have given us a lift,” Brother Saile muttered unhappily, looking after the coach as it dwindled into the distance. “Plenty of room. There were no more than two passengers, were there?”

  Brother Jovann shook his head, not having noticed whether there had been any other passengers. His attention had been held by the old man’s eyes, which had probably never seen the friars at all. Those eyes, fixed in the direction of the Holy City a hundred miles and more away, were clear and gray and powerful. But they were also very much afraid.

  When Derron Odegard walked out on the victory celebration at Time Operations, he had no clear idea of where he was going. Only when he found himself approaching the nearby hospital complex did he realize that his feet were taking him to Lisa. Yet, it would be best to face her at once and get it over with.

  At the student nurses’ quarters he learned that she had moved out the day before, after having gotten permission to drop out of training there. While being tested and considered for other jobs, she was sharing a cubicle with another girl in a low-rank, uplevel corridor.

  It was Lisa’s new roommate who opened the door to Derron’s knock; since the girl was in the midst of doing something to her hair, she went back inside the cubicle and pretended not to be listening.

  Lisa must have seen Derron’s news in his face. Her own face at once became as calm as a mask, and she remained just inside the half-open door, letting him stand in the narrow corridor to be brushed by the curious and incurious passers-by.

  “It’s Matt,” he said to her. When there was no reaction, he went on. “Oh, the battle’s won. The berserkers are stopped. But he sacrificed himself to do it. He’s dead.”

  Proud and hard as a shield, her mask-face lifted slightly toward him. “Of course he is. He did the job you gave him. I knew he would.”

  “Understand, Lisa—when I went to him with that sales talk I thought he was going to have a chance, a good chance.”

  She was not going to be able to keep the shield up, after all; with something like relief he saw her face begin to move and heard her voice begin to break. She said, “I—knew you were going to kill him.”

  “My God, Lisa, that wasn’t what I meant to do!” He kept his hands from reaching out to her.

  Slowly dissolving and melting into a woman’s grief, she leaned against the doorjamb, her hands hidden behind her. “And now—there’s—n-nothing to be done!”

  “The doctors tried—but no, nothing. And Operations can’t go back to do anything for Matt in the past—it’d wreck the world if we tried to pull him out of that mess now.”

  “The world’s not worth it!”

  He was murmuring some banality, and had reached out at last to try to comfort her, when the door slammed in his face.

  If Lisa was the woman he needed, he would have stayed there; so he thought to himself a few days later as he sat alone in his tiny private office on the Operations Level. He would have stayed and made her open the door again or else kicked it down. It was only a door of plastic, and behind it she was still alive.

  The fact was, of course, that the woman he did need had been for a year and more behind the door of death. And no man could smash through that. A man could only stand before that door and mourn, until he found that he was able to turn away.

  Derron had been sitting in his office staring into space for some little time before he noticed an official-looking envelope that some courier must have left on his small desk. The envelope was neat and thick, sealed and addressed to him. After looking inertly at it for a while he took it up and opened it.

  Inside was the formal notice of his latest promotion, to the rank of lieutenant colonel. “… in consideration of your recent outstanding service in Time Operations, and in the expectation that you will continue …” A set of appropriate collar insignia was enclosed.

  The insignia held in his hand as if forgotten, he sat there a while longer, looking across the room at an object—it was an ancient battle-helmet, ornamented with wings—that rested like a trophy atop his small bookcase. He was still doing this when the clangor of the alert signal sounded throughout Operations and pulled him reflexively to his feet. In another moment he was out the door and on his way to the briefing room.

  Latecomers were still hurrying in when a general officer, Time Ops’ chief of staff, mounted the dais and began to speak.

  “The third assault we’ve been expecting has begun, gentlemen. Win or lose, this will be the last attack the berserkers can mount outside of present-time. It’ll give us the final bearing we need to locate their staging area twenty-one thousand years down.”

  There were a few scattered expressions of optimism.

  “I suggest that you don’t cheer yet. This third attack gives every indication of involving some new tactics on the enemy’s part, something subtle and extremely dangerous.”

  The general performed the usual unveiling of some hastily assembled maps and models. “Like the previous attack, this one is aimed at a single individual; and, again, there’s no doubt about the target’s identity. This time the name is Vincent Vincento.”

  There was a murmur at that name, a ripple of awe and wonder and concern. There would have been a similar reaction from almost any audience that might have been assembled on Sirgol. Even the half-educated of that world had heard of Vincento, though the man was some three hundred years dead and had never ruled a nation, started a religion, or raised an army.

  Derron’s attention became sharply focused, and he sat up straighter, his feeling of inertia slipping away. In his prewar historical studies he had specialized in Vincento’s time and place—and that locale was also oddly connected with his private grief.

  The general on the dais spoke on, in businesslike tones. “Vincento’s lifeline is among the very few ultra-important ones for which we have provided continuous sentry protection along their entire effective lengths. Of course, this doesn’t mean that a berserker can’t get near him. But should one of them try to do violent harm to Vincento, or even to any other person within a couple of miles of him, we’d be on to its keyhole in a couple of seconds and cancel it out. The same thing applies if they should try to kidnap or capture Vincento himself.

  “This special protection actually starts back in Vincento’s grandparents’ time and runs along his lifeline until his completion of his last important work at the age of seventy-eight, and we can assume the enemy knows that this protection exists. That’s why I said that this time the berserkers’ plans are no doubt subtle.”

  After going into the technical details of the sentry protection against direct violence, the general moved on to discuss another point. “Chronologically, the enemy penetration is not more than a tenday before the start of Vincento’s famous trial by the Defenders of the Faith. This may well be more than a coincidence. Suppose, for example, that a berserker could alter the outcome of this trial to a death sentence for Vincento. If the Defenders should decide to burn him at the stake, the berserker’s part in his death would be too indirect to give us any help in finding its keyhole.

  “And also remember—an actual death sentence would not seem to be necessary for the enemy’s purpose. Vincento at the time of his trial is seventy years old. If he should be put to torture or thrown into a dungeon, the od
ds are high that his life would be effectively ended.”

  A general seated in the front row raised his hand. “Doesn’t he historically undergo some such treatment?”

  “No. That’s a fairly common idea. But, historically, Vincento never spent a day of his life in prison. During his trial he occupied a friendly ambassador’s quarters. And after his recantation, he passed the few years left to him in physically comfortable house arrest. There he gradually went blind, from natural causes—and also laid the foundation of the science of dynamics. On that work of his, needless to say, our modern science and our survival most heavily depend. Make no mistake about it, those last years of Vincento’s life after his trial are vital to us.”

  The questioning general shifted in his front rank chair. “How in the world is an alien machine going to influence the outcome of a trial in an ecclesiastical court?”

  The briefing officer could only shake his head and stare gloomily at his charts. “Frankly, we’ve still a shortage of good ideas on that. We doubt that the enemy will try again to play a supernatural role, after the failure of their last attempt along that line.

  “But here’s an angle worth keeping in mind. Only one enemy device is engaged in this attack, and from all screen indications it’s a physically small machine, only about the size of a man. Which immediately suggests to us the possibility that this one may be an android.” The speaker paused to look round at his audience. “Oh, yes, I know, the berserkers have never, anywhere, been able to fabricate an android that would pass in human society as a normal person. Still, we hardly dare rule out the possibility that this time they’ve succeeded.”

  A discussion got going on possible counter-measures. A whole arsenal of devices were being kept in readiness in Stage Two for dropping into the past, but no one could say yet what might be needed.

  The briefing officer pushed his charts aside for the moment. “The one really bright spot, of course, is that this attack lies within the time band where we can drop live agents. So naturally we’ll count on putting men on the spot as our main defense. Their job will be to keep their eyes on Vincento from a little distance; they’ll be people able to spot any significant deviation from history when they see it. Those we choose as agents will need to know that particular period very well, besides having experience in Time Operations. …”

  Listening, Derron looked down at the new insignia he was still carrying in his hand. And then he began at last to fasten them on.

  About two miles along the road from the spot where they had met, Brother Jovann and Brother Saile topped yet another rise and discovered that they were about to catch up with the coach that had passed them so speedily not long before. Its load-beasts unharnessed and grazing nearby, the vehicle stood empty beside the broken gate of a high-walled enclosure, which crouched under slate roofs at the foot of the next hill ahead.

  Atop that hill there rose the already famed cathedral-temple of Oibbog, much of its stonework still too new to bear moss or signs of weathering. Holding its spire now immense and overshadowing against the lowering sky, the graceful mass seemed almost to float, secure above all human effort and concern.

  The ancient road, after passing the broken gate of the monastery at the foot of the new cathedral’s hill, swerved left to meet a bridge. Or the stub of a bridge, rather. From where the friars now stood they could see that all of the spans were gone, together with four of the six piers that had supported them. The river that had torn them down was raging still, jamming tree trunks like forked spears against the supports that remained. Obviously swollen to several times its normal flow, the current was ravaging the lowlands on both its banks.

  On the other side of the torrent, beyond another stub of bridge, the walled town of Oibbog sat secure on its high ground. People could be seen moving here and there in those distant streets. Inside the town’s gate, which opened on the Empire road, more coaches and load-beasts waited, having been interrupted in journeys outbound from the Holy City.

  Brother Jovann watched leaden clouds still mounting ominously up the sky. Fleeing from these clouds was the river, a great swollen terrified snake being lashed and goaded by distant flails of lightning, a snake that had burst its bonds and carried them away.

  “Brother River will not let us cross tonight.”

  When he heard this personification, Brother Saile turned his head slowly and cautiously around, as if he wondered whether he was expected to laugh. But before he had time to decide, the rain broke again, like a waterfall. Tucking up the skirts of their robes, both friars ran. Jovann sprinted barefoot, Saile with sandals flapping, to join the occupants of the coach in whatever shelter the abandoned-looking monastery might afford.

  A hundred miles away, in what had been the capital of the vanished Empire and was now the Holy City of the embattled Temple, the same day was warm and sultry. Only the wrath of Nabur the Eighth, eighty-first in the succession of Vicars of the Holy One, stirred like a storm wind the air of his luxurious private apartments.

  This wrath had been some time accumulating, thought Defender Belam, who stood in robes of princely scarlet, waiting in silent gravity for it to be over. It had been accumulated and saved up till now, when it could be discharged harmlessly, vented into the discreet ears of a most trusted auditor and friend.

  The vicar’s peripatetic tirade against his military and theological opponents broke off in mid-sentence; Nabur was distracted, and his pacing stopped, by a dull scraping sound, ending in a heavy thud, which floated in from outside, accompanied by the shouts of workmen. The vicar moved to look down from a balconied window into a courtyard. Earlier, Belam had seen the workmen down there, starting to unload some massive blocks of marble from a train of carts. Today a famed sculptor was to choose one block, and then begin work on Nabur’s portrait-statue.

  What did it matter if each of eighty predecessors had been willing to let their worldly glorification wait upon posterity?

  The vicar turned from the balcony suddenly, the skirts of his simple white robe swirling, and caught Belam wearing a disapproving face.

  In his angry tenor, which for the past forty years had sounded like an old man’s voice, the vicar declaimed, “When the statue is completed we will have it placed in the city’s Great Square, that the majesty of our office and our person may be increased in the eyes of the people!”

  “Yes, my vicar.” Belam’s tone was quite calm. For decades he had been a Defender of the Faith and a Prince of the Temple. From close range he had seen them come and go, and he was not easily perturbed by vicarial tempers.

  Nabur felt the need to explain. “Belam, it is needful that we be shown increased respect. The infidels and heretics are tearing apart the world which has been given by God into our care!” The last sentence came bursting out, a cry from the inner heart.

  “My faith is firm, my Vicar, that our prayers and our armies will yet prevail.”

  “Prevail?” The vicar came stalking toward him, grimacing sarcastically. “Of course! Someday. Before the end of time! But now, Belam, now our Holy Temple lies bleeding and suffering, and we …” The vicarial voice dropped temporarily into almost inaudible weakness. “We must bear many burdens. Many and heavy, Belam. You cannot begin to realize, until you mount our throne.”

  Belam bowed, in sincere and silent reverence.

  The vicar paced again, skirts flapping. This time he had a goal. From his high-piled worktable he snatched up in shaking fist a pamphlet that was already worn from handling, and wrinkled, as if it had perhaps been once or twice crumpled up and thrown across a room.

  Belam knew what the pamphlet was. A contributing if not a sufficient cause of today’s rage, he thought, with his cool habit of theologian’s logic. A small thorn compared with others. But this particular barb had stabbed Nabur in the tenderest part of his vanity.

  Nabur was shaking the paper-covered booklet at him.

  “Because you have been away, Belam, we have not yet had the opportunity to discuss with you this—this ba
ck-stabbing abomination of Messire Vincento’s! This so-called Dialogue on the Movement of the Tides! Have you read it?”

  “I—“

  “The wretched man cares nothing about the tides. In this pamphlet his purpose is to once more promulgate his heresy-tainted dreams. He clings to his wish to reduce the solid world beneath our feet to a mere speck, to send us all flying around the sun. But even that is not enough. No, not for him!”

  Belam frowned now in real puzzlement. “What else, my Vicar?”

  Nabur advanced on him in a glow of anger, as if the Defender were the guilty one. “What else? I will tell you! The arguments of this pamphlet are cast in the form of a debate among three persons. And Vincento its author intends one of these fictional debaters—the one who defends traditional ideas, who therefore is described as ‘simple-minded’ and ‘below the level of human intelligence’—he intends this person to represent ourself!”

  “My Vicar!”

  Nabur nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes. Some of our very words are put into the mouth of this simpleton, so-called!”

  Belam was shaking his head in strong doubt. “Vincento has never been moderate in his disputes, which have been many. Many? Nay, continuous, rather. But I am convinced that he has not in this pamphlet or elsewhere intended any irreverence, either to your person or to your holy office.”

  “I know what he intended here!” Vicar Nabur almost screamed the words. Then the most honored man in the world—possibly also the most hated, quite possibly also the most burdened by what he saw as his God-given tasks—groaned incontinently and, like a spoiled child, threw himself into a chair.

  Arrogance remained, as always, but the spoiled-child aspect did not last long. Irascible humors having been discharged, calm and intelligence returned.

  “Belam.”

  “My Vicar?”

  “Have you yet had time to study this pamphlet, while on your travels perhaps? I know it has been widely circulated.”